I’ve been creating books in epublishing for close to a decade now, and as an editor and publisher, I”ve published a lot of Christmas titles. It always amazes me that the Christmas zeitgeist can be re-interpreted (and recycled, if you will) so consistently and enthusiastically every year.

Why Gay Bars Are Closing

This continues to be a topic of fascination in gay culture.

“Guys my age stopped going out to bars all the time,” said Jack LaFary, a former bartender at Indianapolis’s 501 Eagle, which closed this year.He’s interviewed this week in a piece by the Chicago Tribune, which examines the fact that gay bars are slowly but steadily going extinct.

Some people blame it on rising rents, others on smart phones. In the past, and really not too long ago, gay bars were a few of the only places where gay people could meet. I think that has a lot to do with it, too. Thanks to all the gay activists who have worked so hard for all of us all these years, we can meet each other almost anywhere nowadays and we don’t have to hide in the dark.

Here’s something President Obama said about gay activists. It’s a quote from an Atlantic piece.

[T]here have been times where, let’s say on LGBT issues, when we were trying to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I got the Pentagon and Bob Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, to authorize a study of how you might end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, headed up by Jeh Johnson, who at that time was a council to the Justice Department. And it was going to take a year to conduct that study, issue a report, and figure out how it might be implemented, what effect it would have on unit cohesion and military effectiveness. And I had laid out this strategy because if I could get the Pentagon’s imprimatur on this thing, then I knew that we could end up getting legislation passed to reverse the policy, and we could get the branches of all the military to implement it. But during the course of that year, probably every speech I gave, I’d have gay activists just screaming at me during rallies. And you just say, ‘Come on, man. Not only do I agree with you, but I’ve actually got a strategy to execute, we are executing it, and in what sense do you think that you yelling at me here is going to advance your cause?’”